I thought I was going crazy today, because it seemed like all my themes on the theme site had broken images and pages leading to 404’s. I did some clicking around and pretty much anything that isn’t a blog or a single page had the same issues.

So you’ve removed the generation of themes from exampleSite for the moment?

I know it’s easy to say, so just my opinion. But I don’t think enforcing set demo content is a good idea. I mean it’s just too limiting. You want to encourage site designs and architectures that are more than blogs and have rich demo content.

Just wanted to add. That I spent quite a bit of time trying to generate the hugoThemes site locally to debug the broken demos on my themes. I wasnt able to generate the site because of multiple git submodule problems.

The point im trying to make is. I think if it was a bit easier for the community to run the hugoThemes site locally, you might get more self policing, with people providing pull requests for broken themes or inappropriate content. As it stands I think the bar is a bit to high to get it running locally and thus provide meaningfull pull requests if you are so inclined.

So you’ve removed the generation of themes from exampleSite for the moment?

I know it’s easy to say, so just my opinion. But I don’t think enforcing set demo content is a good idea. I mean it’s just too limiting. You want to encourage site designs and architectures that are more than blogs and have rich demo content.

No we haven’t removed the generation of themes from the exampleSite. Only the content directory is inherited from the hugoBasicExample.

Configuration

Static images

Data files

are still inherited by a theme’s exampleSite.

Your arguments are valid, but unfortunately that is how it has to be from now.

We simply do not have the means to police what content gets pushed whenever a theme is updated and we had instances of inappropriate content that was discovered months after it was pushed to the Hugo website.

Note that the update is not done yet. I know about the missing hero image and copy in your theme demo. It is possible to have them back by entering the parameters in the relevant content files of the hugoBasicExample.

Also note that we indeed encourage site designs and architecture. If a theme is truly outstanding we can white list its demo so that it uses its own content directory. However also we have noticed that theme authors use old patterns. Most submissions do not use newer features like Image Processing and Page Bundles so when the refactoring cycle of the HugoBasicExample content is done these will be strongly recommended because the default content will be structured in such a way.

Also to speed things up if you want feel free to send a PR to include the missing image and text parameters for your theme’s demo.

As I said above, feel free to add the missing image and text parameters in the content files of the hugoBasicExample and then just send a PR to have them incorporated.

Are you suggesting I add my custom frontmatter for my homepage ie heroBackground to the hugoBasicExample repo? Wouldn’t that put my theme specific frontmatter into the example content that would be used for hundreds of themes?